LEARNING OUR WAY FORWARD
REFLECTIONS ON ACTIVATING CIVIC ASSETS WHEN CERTAINTY IS IN SHORT SUPPLY
By Adam Trevaskus
The Brunswick Design and Innovation Centre( BRUDI) is the result of an ambitious vision, pursued despite a lack of certainty and a constantly changing environment, demonstrating the power of collaborative partnerships. When Merri-bek City Council and Impact Neighbourhoods began the journey in early 2020, they saw the potential to transform a former secondary school campus into a place for enterprise, innovation and local economic activity, but there was no established model or obvious pathway for getting there.
Comprising two ageing buildings and approximately 4,000 square metres of commercial floorspace, the site today is home to a thriving community of enterprises, attracting new investment and giving a once-underused civic asset a very different role in Merri-bek’ s local economy.
This article explores how Council and Impact Neighbourhoods navigated those early uncertainties and, through an evolving partnership, transformed the potential of the site into a thriving economic and civic asset.
Councils inherit buildings, land and civic infrastructure that carry untapped potential, but with them come competing priorities, constrained budgets and governance responsibilities that demand careful risk management. Add changing political landscapes, changing markets and, in BRUDI’ s case, a global pandemic, and the temptation is to wait until the picture becomes clearer before committing. One of the project’ s first lessons was that clarity was never going to arrive on its own; uncertainty became the environment within which every important decision would eventually be made.
The temptation when telling a story like this is to focus on the outcomes and not provide the full picture of how the project evolved. Today, BRUDI supports more than 200 jobs and over 30 businesses; instead of remaining a cost centre, it has become a revenue and value generator, attracting more than $ 3.2 million in private capital investment into the building itself. Beyond the asset, individual tenant businesses have gone on to raise substantial capital of their own, with one tenant attracting over $ 60 million in investment.
These outcomes are significant, but viewed in isolation they can create the impression that the pathway to success was clear from the outset. It was not. The more instructive story is how a council and a private partner progressively found a way forward together, adapting their approach as the project evolved, despite neither being able to confidently predict what success would ultimately look like.
The building itself presented a number of dilemmas. Selling might have generated an immediate financial return, but as Crown land, that option was not really available to Council. Equally, like most local governments, Merri-bek did not have several million dollars sitting in a budget to fund the transformation of an ageing building into a modern innovation hub, at a time when activating any commercial space was made harder by everyone working from home. If neither the public sector nor the private sector could solve these dilemmas independently, could they create the conditions to solve them together?
That question became much more important than the building itself.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL VOL 19 NO 2 2026 11